BOOKS.

SARA COLERIDGE'S LETTERS.* THESE volumes, containing extracts from the correspondence of Coleridge's only daughter, who alone had the learning and the power to edit her father's remains with notes expounding and defending (and defending with very great ability) his theological and philosophical views, give the impression at once of one of the wisest and also of one of the most truly feminine natures that was ever possessed of great learning and great powers of thought. In the correspondence of clever women,—chiefly, no doubt, because they have so often been made much of as exceptional creatures,— and too often even of clever men, we are apt to find a good deal of effort, a good deal of ambition to make a splash where there would otherwise be danger of being merely common-place. Nothing can be less like the letters of Sara Coleridge. With the exception of a single letter, in which she tried to be playful concerning the origin of her own graceful fairy story Phantasmion, and in which, owing probably to that nervousness which so often makes it impossible for modest people to talk easily about their own work, she certainly succeeded in writing a very forced style for the first and last time in her life, there is not a sign of effort, not a trace of pumped-up literary energy, from the first to the last page of these interesting volumes. All is natural, simple, thoughtful, and wise, answering perfectly to the fine engraving of Mr. Lawrence's beautiful portrait of her in her widowhood,—which is the very impersonation of feminine grace, maternal sweetness, intellectual lucidity, light, firm purpose, and tranquil nerve. That is hardly the character we should have expected from a daughter of Coleridge. Of

* Memoir awl Letters of Sara Coleridge. Edited by her Daughter. 2 vole. London: Henry E. King and Co:

rambling monologue, of metaphysical deep-sea soundings, of imaginative irresolution, of wide-reaching dreams and meagre performances, "of the soiled glory and the trailing wing," there is not a vestige in the natural, earnest, often profoundly learned, always eminently sensible, affectionate, and womanlike letters of these volumes. For poise of judgment it would be difficult to find Sara Coleridge's equal either among men or women. What the volumes want in their present form is either a little more variety or a little more compression, but the fault here, if there be one, is not in the writer, but in the making of the selection,—an ex- ceedingly difficult task, which has, on the whole, been discharged with great judgment. Sara Coleridge's temperament was from the first pensive, and as her life was in great measure one of im- perfect health and bereavement, the general tone of her letters is a little sombre. " Pensive " was the distinguishing characteristic chosen by Wordsworth in his Triad to describe his friend's daughter, and what he added to it exactly paints the external lot, as well as the spiritual character, which these volumes reflect :—

" Last of the Three, though eldest born,

Reveal thyself, like pensive morn, Touched by the skylark's earliest note, Ere humbler gladness be afloat; But whether in the semblance drest Of dawn, or eve, fair vision of the West.

Come, with each anxious hope subdued By woman's gentle fortitude, Each grief, through meekness, settling into rest.

Or I would hail thee when some high-wrought page Of a closed volume lingering in thy hand, Has raised thy spirit to a peaceful stand Among the glories of a happier age."

The letters, however, contain nothing of the gloom of continued dejection. Even after her bitterest trials, Sara Coleridge writes with a sweet resignation and even serenity which is almost marvellous. But as the brightest of her moods has a pale moon- light tint in it, and the interest of her letters is predominantly either theological or critical, there is more need than there would be in the case of a writer more inclined to gaiety and wit, for a careful avoidance of repetition, and as much compression as might have been compatible with a life-like picture. On this head there may, perhaps, be something left to desire. We are in- clined to think that a single volume might be made out of these two, which would have more than the interest of both, because it would paint the writer's thought and character in more concentrated colours. It is only in the case of minds of very great play and vivacity that something of diffuseness of portraiture adds to the effect of the picture. Sara Coleridge's was not a mind of very wide play. It was a deep, strong, serious, tender nature, of very high thinking power, but not of the highest order of elasticity. Ill-health had from the first drained away any vivacity which she had by nature. In one of her later letters— written, however, some time before the first approaches of the last fatal illness—she says, with that delicate accuracy of self-delinea- tion which is, with her, a phase of melancholy humour, after making complaint of the claims which London makes on sociability :—" I wish to feel for about a fortnight that I am at liberty to be a poor, faint, spiritless creature, that is not called upon for a single smile or the slightest outward sign of sympathy." And it is this feeling of rather inadequate vitality which gives a certain effect of same- ness, of monotony of,, colour, to letters which, with rather more of vivacity in them, would not seem to repeat themselves at all.

That Sara Coleridge had many of. the finest qualities of a poet no one who knows the many graceful songs and verses embodied in her fairy tale Phantasmion, and the occasional pieces interspersed elsewhere in her essays, can doubt. Take, for in- stance, this fine poetical defence of herself for editing her father's works, written in answer to some assertion that a relative or personal friend is too blind, too much biassed, for the office of a biographer :- "Passion is blind, not love,—her wondrous might Informs with threefold pow'r man's inward sight :— To her deep glance the soul at large display 'd Shows all its mingled mass of light and shale; Men call her blind when she but turns her head, Nor scans the fault for which her tea--; are shed. Can dull Indifference or Hate's troubled gaze See through the secret heart's mysterious maze ? Can Scorn and Envy pierce that dread abode Where true faults rest beneath the eye of God ? Not theirs, 'mid inward darkness, to discern The spiritual splendours how they shine and burn. All bright endowments of a noble mind

They, who with joy behold them, soonest find ; And better none its stains of frailty know Than they who fain would see it white as snow."

These lines are very expressive of their author,—eloquent, delicate;

true poetic fervour. It is generally the same with the poetical pieces in Phantasmion, though some of these are so airy in their beauty, that one does not note the pallor of the poetical flame. rhantasmion itself, however, is both too prolix and too complex for its purpose.

The same tranquilly sad, though soft and delicate, moral genius speaks again and again in the fine, subtle self-criticisms of these pages. Take, for instance, the two following sentences; which we extract from consecutive pages, both of them in the same tone of sweet, half-poetical melancholy. The first is on the author's own position as a widow :— "You can scarce imagine the change from wife to widow, from being lovingly flattered from morn to night, to a sudden stillness of the voice of praise and approbation awl admiration.—a comparative dead silence it seems. Vanity and the affections have such a mixed interest in this, that it is hard to disentangle them, and the former during a happy state of marriage grows up unperceived under the shadow of the latter, and absorbs some of its juices."

The latter is written after a stay in Kent, and expresses her longing for the home of her childhood in the Lake country :—

" Them is a stillness in the landscapes of this county, owing to the want of wat3r, and moving objects, which is to my feel- ings almost melancholy. I can admire other counties beside my own native lakeland, other sorts of nature-beauty, abundantly, but I cannot thoroughly like and enjoy any but that in which I was born. When in the country I am full of thoughts and longings for my native vale. Friars Crag, and Cockshot, and Goosey Green, and Latrigg side,—all my old haunts, I long for. Yet, if I were there, I should find that my youth was wanting. and the friends of my youth, 'and that I had, been longing for them along with the old scenes, the old familiar faces, and the old familiar places together."

In both these passages there is something of the liquid plaintiveness and sad self-knowledge which characterise her brother Hartley's exquisite sonnets, and it would be easy to multiply very largely .specimens of the like tone.

But though there is plenty of evidence of the poetic vein in Sara .Coleridge's mind, the striking characteristic of these letters is the sus- tained, even almost unerring good sense, not only of every thought, but of feeling. It is clear that so far as character is inherited, she gained this-from her mother, and not from her fatber ; indeed, nothing is more certain than that, with all her deep reverence for her father's intellect, and admiration for his great powers, it was to her mother that she was most deeply attached, both in childhood and in after life. In the short autobiographic fragment which she left behind her, she bas given the best evidence of this. And as it is in a passage which illustrates strikingly her own evenly-balanced judgment, as well as her clear insight into one of her father's weaknesses, it is worth while to give it here :— " I have no doubt there was much enjoyment in my young life at that time, but S01113 of my recollections are tinged with pain. I think my dear father was anxious that I should learn to love hint and the Wordsworths and their children, and not cling so exclusively to my mother, and all around me at home. Ho was therefore much annoyed when, on my mother's coming to Allan Bank, I flew to her, and wished not to be separated from her any more. I remember his showing dis- pleasure to me, and accusing me of want of affection. I could not understand why. The young Wordsworths came in and caressed him. I sate benumbed ; for truly nothing does so freeze affection as the breath of jealousy. The sense that you have done very wrong, or at least given offence, you know not how or why—that you are dunned for some payment of love or feeling which you know not how to produce 'of to demonstrate on a sudden, chills the heart, and fills it with per- plexity and bitterness. My father reproached me, and contrasted my coldness with the childish caresses of the little Wordsworths. I slunk away, and hid myself in the wood behind the house, and there my friend John, whom at that time I called my future husband, came to seek me."

Nothing could be truer than the various touches of moral criticism, all of them charitable, and all keen, throughout these letters. Take this, for instance, on the relation between spiritual humility and spiritual pride :—

" The sense of bring worse than any one else, if thus kept in its :sphere by reason, will be nothing more than a keen spiritual sensibility ; if it went further, and clouded that inward eye which makes us acquainted with truth, we know not what perversions might follow, what evil reactions and corruptions, even of the spiritual mind by means of the understanding. How often has it appeared as if excessive -spiritual humility passed over into spiritual pride, and the very man who was calling himself a worm, and really fancying himself such, has shown by his acts and words that he considered every soul alive that did not embrace his notions of election, justification, and such parts of theology, as far beneath himself, in the eye of God, as a soul that is and is to be cast out for ever, is beneath a soul that is to he saved. Yet this same self-deceiver, as he referred to feeling alone, felt sure that ho was really humble. Had he tried himself by all the different criteria whereby we may arrive at a knowledge of ourselves, by the state of his heart and by his outward course of action, by the conclusions of his judging and comparing faculty, as well as by his emotions, he could hardly have been thus ignorant what spirit he was of."

thoughtful, true, but hardly burning bright enough to reach the And this, on the exigeance of parents in relation to their children's

love :— " It is certainly right that parents should form, as much as possible, a friendship with their children, and seek mental association with them ; but it seems to mo that their desire for this, and endeavour after it, should not be without limits. Parents and children cannot be to each other as husbands with wives and wives with husbands. Nature has separated them by an almost impassable barrier of time ; the mind and the heart are in quite a different state at fifteen and at forty. Then, too, we must consider, that though so many diffi- culties attend the comfortable marriage of young people in our rank of life ; yet marriage, somewhere between seventeen and thirty, is what we should look to for them, as a possible and, upon the whole, desirable event for them in ordinary cases. This probability alone must inter- fere with our forming such habits of continual intercourse with them and dependence upon them for hourly comfort and amusement, as it would be very painful to break off in case of their doing what it is cer- tainly most for their life-long happiness that they should do,—forming a marriage connection which may endure when we are gone to our rest. Whatever is most natural, so that it be not of the nature of sin, is in all ordinary cases the best and safest."

The same penetrating good sense dominates all Sara Coleridge's great theological learning, and helps her to bring back every theological doctrine, however much mystified by dissertation, to the final test of spiritual judgment. What can be more to the point, for instance, than this criticism on the Roman Catholic dictum that men are saved by " implicit faith," that is, by sub- mitting to an authority which is to teach them they know not

what:— "St. Paul says that we are to know the things that are given us of God, that they are to be spiritually discerned, that God reveals them to the faithful, yea, the deep things of God. Our saving faith consists, I think, in a spiritual beholding, a perception of truth of the highest order which purifies the heart, and changes the soul from glory to glory, while it gazes on the image of the .divine perfections. The holy apostle prays that • the eyes of our understanding being enlightened,' we may know Jesus Christ, and what is the hope of His calling. The doctrine of implicit faith, that men are saved by believing something to be true of which they have no idea or knowledge, I cannot find in the Bible. My not finding would be nothing, if others could find and show it me. But who can show A there? It seems to mo to be a doctrine of fallible men, not of Christ Himself, who always speaks of His teaching as being in accordance with the constitution and faculties which God has given us, as having its witness in our own hearts and minds, if they are not darkened by clouds of prejudieo and passion. Reason is alike in all mankind, I therefore arrogate nothing to myself in particu- lar when I express my agreement with the maxim of my father and many other thoughtful men, that faith consists in a spiritual beholding, the evidence of things not seen' with the bodily eye. By faith we understand,' says the writer to the Hebrews, that the worlds were framed by the word of God."

And again, how candid she is towards Rome as to the histories argument, while holding firmly to the view that the historical evidence for the ancient claims of the Papacy, coming as it does, only in the midst of a great number of inconsistent and hesi- tating patristic judgments, really justifies the Reformers in regard- ing the Early Church as quite as fallible concerning the truths of revelation as are the Churches of our own day :—

" I must concede to the Romanist that the Fathers generally, and by a sort of consent, attributed a pro-eminence to the See and Bishop of Rome, which properly involve the supremacy even in the modern sense ; and their words and actions, repudiating the paramount authority of the latter, are really inconsistent with their attributions to the suc- cessor of the Fisherman, when no particular interest or influence induces them to diminish his claims. I have lately examined this question in debates with Mr. —, who has satisfied himself that tho Romish- Church theory is the only tenable one, and although unable myself to receive or admire any mystico-ecclesiastical system, Roman or Angli- can. yet with a strong desire to find the Romanist pretensions to patristic testimony in favour of the Papacy wholly vain. But in this I have been disappointed. The language of Cyprian, Ambrose, and very many other Fathers, as well as of Councils venerated by Anglo- Catholics, is unmeaning and self-contradictory, if understood so as to exclude the supremacy. It imports that the Bishop of Roma, is the centre and origin of unity; his see the rock on which the Church is built ; himself the successor of Peter, from whom the ' Apostolate and Episcopate in Christ took its beginning ;' that' where Peter is, there is the Church ;' that to be out of communion with Rome is to be cut off from Christ; that from the See of Peter 'the full grace of all Pontiffs is derived;' that the Roman Church is the 'foundation and mould of the Churches ;' that the Holy See 'transmits its rights to the universal Church ;' that ' the Pope is the head of the Church, other Bishops the members.' In the Third General Council he was acknowledged to be the 'Head of the whole Faith.' Now surely this language, and it is quite as general as any which can be cited from the fatherhood on the Con-substantiality of Christ with the Father, or the three Persons in the Godhead, is senseless babble, if it does not mean that the Pope is the source of jurisdiction and the ultimate decider of controversy in the Church. The ancient Fathers, with scarce a dissentient voice, ascribe a pre-eminence and authority to Peter over the other Apostles; and as all the Apostles had supernatural powers, what could St. Peter have beyond them, except what is now ascribed to the Pope as his successor, namely, to be their earthly head, tho channel of grace and episcopal power from Christ to them, consequently to be the ultimate judge of questions concerning the faith? I sully admit that the Fathers and Bishops often contradict this doctrine, as I have already said (though Tertullian's language proves that the Papal supremacy was asserted in

the second century), and the Canons of Sardica are strong evidence that it was not a 'law and tradition of the Church ' acknowledged from the beginning, as well as the silence of the earliest Christian writers, especially St. Ignatius, who exalts the Episcopate, and says naught of any Bishop of Bishops. But surely this incoherent and conflicting testimony, of which it seems impossible to make a harmonious whole, and which keeps up the controversy between the Churches, contains ample vindication of the attitude assumed by genuine Scriptaral Pro- testantism, which acknowledges no positive divine ground of faith but the Bible, acknowledged to be divine by its own internal charaster, and corresponding to the image of the divine within us, not by any external testimony of the visible Church."

In fact, no theologian who ever lived was less in danger of being crushed beneath a weight of learning than Sara Coleridge, who was deeply read in many of the Greek and Latin fathers, and yet judged them as calmly, and with as little tendency either to underrate or overrate them, as she judged of Ward, Pusey, and Newman. A delicate moral poise of judgment is visible in every page, whether she is discussing the best discipline for children, or the true meaning of justification by faith.

As a critic she is almost at her best. The stimulus of resistance heightened her powers in a manner of which she gives us an admirable and, what is somewhat rare with her, a humorous account in one page, and a very happy illustration in another. This is her own description of the tonic which reckless and un- intelligent dogmatism produced upon her, even in that feeble state, in which—usually—she was anticipating luncheon with all the faint desire of a sinking frame:— "My rule is, not to let my friends visit me at that early hour, when they can with no great difficulty come at a later one ; because the two hours before my mid-day meal are with me the most uneasy in the whole twenty-four. Still, I do not wish to be more subjected to my bodily weakness than' is unavoidable, and every now and then I am called down to some old friend whom I do not like to send away unseen. Old gentlemen especially will take their own way in such matters, and look in when it suits them rather than when it suits me. At first I feel faint and cross; but when they begin laying down the law about this and that, —the Church and the Tract doctrines, and other such subjects,—as if there was but one opinion in the world that was really worth a straw, and that their own.—all other reasoners and thinkers dancing about after vain shadows and will-o'-the-wisps,—I am provoked into a sort of enraged strength,—my controversial muscles begin to plump up,—I lose sight of luncheon (a vision of which had been float- ing before my dull eyes before), and as soon as a pause occurs, I fill it up with my voice, and whether listened to or not, improve by exercise my small powers of expressing opinion."

And this is her admirably playful dissection of the awfully Scotch tenacity of Chalmers's argumentation :—

" The substance of what pleases you in -Abercrombie, I have lately read in Chalmers's Bridgewater Treatise ; and, oh ! when the wordy Doctor does get hold of an argument what a splutter does he make with it for dozens of pages. He is like a child with a new was doll ; he hugs it, kisses it, holds it up to be admired, makes its eyes open and shut, puts it on a pink gown, puts it on a blue gown, ties it on a- yellow sash ; then pretends to take it to task, chatters at it, shakes it, and whips it; tolls it not to be so proud of its fine false ringlets, which can all be cut off in a minute, then takes it into favour again ; and at last, to the relief of all the company, puts it to bed."

This critical accuracy of aim, often displayed in matters intellectual, as here, but still more in all matters moral and spiritual, is perfectly reflected in these letters. More faintly, but still, as we have shown, not indistinctly, there is conveyed that fine flavour of spiritual beauty, on which Mr. Aubrey de Vere, in his very beau- tiful letter to the editor, descants as the distinguishing trait of the friend with whom he had interchanged so many letters on the highest and most subtle themes. After all, the essence of a woman's genius almost always admits less of being embodied in writings or letters than any masculine genius of a like order. And Mr. de Pere has done well to remind us, that beside the sweet resigna- tion, the delicate truthfulness, the womanly sense, the unerring moral instinct of Sara Coleridge, there was also an inexpressible spiritual charm, which no one could appreciate who had not enjoyed her personal intercourse :— "How well I remember our discussions ,abont Wordsworth! She was jealous of my admiration for his poems, because it extended to too many of them. No one could be a true 'Wordsworthian, she main- tained, who admired so much some of his later poems, his poems of accomplishment, such as the ' Triad.' It implied a disparagement of his earlier poems, such as ' Resolution and Independence,' in which the genuine Wordaworthian inspiration, and that alone, uttered itself! I suspect, however, that she must have taken a yet more vivid delight in some of her father's poems. Beside their music and their spirituality, they have another quality, in which they stand almost without a rival, —their subtle sweetness. I remember Leigh Hunt once remarking to me on this characteristic of them, and observing that in this respect they were unapproached. It is like distant music, when the tone comes to you pure, without any coarser sound of wood or of wire ; or like odour on the air, when you smell the flower, without detecting in it the stalk or the earth. As regards this characterittic of her father's genius, as well as its spirituality, there was something in hers that re- sembled it. One is reminded of it by the fairylike music of the songs in 'Phantasmion.'" This fragrance "on the air " is just what you must not expect to detect in letters, especially letters written generally in weakness, and often in grief. But it is an additional charm to know that it was there,—and that it was not incompatible with an extra- ordinary weight of learning, a singularly accurate scholarship, a subtle metaphysical temperament, and, finally, a steady sagacity and calmness of judgment which, it might have been feared,. would throw into the shade the fine individual aroma of a sweet feminine nature quite unique in its possession of such gifts.